Several studies suggest that placing executive pay "at risk", i.e., paying bonuses instead of salary, can align the interests of executives and shareholders. Another possible explanation for these findings is that executives of profitable companies are willing to accept a larger percentage of their pay in the form of bonuses on the understanding that bonuses are virtually guaranteed. We propose an alternate measure of the proportion of executive pay that is truly "at risk", and hypothesize that our alternative measure will be more weakly related to profitability than previous studies which have classified all non-salary pay as "at risk".